Chair of Operating Systems

The TUD:OS (TU Dresden Operating Systems) group's objective is to reduce complexity for critical systems by orders of magnitude. To this end, we research, develop and use our own micro-kernel and virtualization technology. We use micro-kernels to componentise critical parts of systems and virtualisation to enable reuse of legacy software for uncritical parts.

It is our objective to combine ambitious systems research with profound education in operating systems and related areas. We try to push research and development far enough such that its results can be used outside of our group, for example by other research groups or as starting points for industrial partners. read more ...

On June 9, Imagination Technologies and Kernkonzept announced the availability of the L4Re microkernel system for the MIPS architecture, supporting the recently introduced hardware virtualization functionality. read more ...

The L4Re operating system, base of the secure system design for smartphones and co-developed by TUD:OS, Kernkonzept, Trust2Core and T-Systems is among the winners of the 2014 German IT Security Award sponsored by Horst-Goertz-Stiftung. read more ...

At [FOSDEM 2014](https://fosdem.org/2014/) in Brussels the OS group will host the 'Microkernel and Component-based Operating Systems' devroom. FOSDEM provides a forum for open source enthusiasts to collaborate. Each year the microkernel devroom brings together hackers of all spectrums of the microkernel community. Check out the Call for Participation, if you are interested: read more ...

Together with our colleagues from TU Dortmund, Horst Schirmeier and Michael Engel, we presented a paper on the Workshop on Design for Reliability at HiPEAC 2013 conference in Berlin: "Investigating the Limitations of PVF for Program Vulnerability Analysis". The poster accompanying the paper was awarded a Best Poster Award by the conference organizers. read more ...

Marcus Hähnel presented our paper "Measuring energy consumption for short code paths using RAPL" at the 2012 Greenmetrics workshop, colocated with the SIGMETRICS 2012 conference. The paper discusses using Intel's RAPL energy performance counters for determining the energy consumption of short-running code paths, such as decoding a single slice of an H.264 video.

The authors were awarded the prize for GreenMetric's Best Student Paper. read more ...

Our group - TUD:OS - released the Linux user space version of our Device Driver
Environment (DDE). DDE is a wrapper that allows running drivers from a
donor operating system on a different host OS. With the current
release it is now possible to run Linux kernel drivers as Linux user
space applications without modification. read more ...

August 2011: New prerelease versions of the NOVA microhypervisor [1] and its user-level environment NUL [2] are now available for download under the terms of the GNU GPLv2. NOVA is a modern microhypervisor that uses hardware virtualization features to run virtual machines with near-native performance. It also hosts the NOVA Userland (NUL), a multiserver environment featuring a deprivileged virtual machine monitor.

Among other things, the new prerelease improves the security of device- and interrupt assignment by using capabilities for these operations. There is also a new hypercall for interacting with the scheduler. While there are few NOVA Userland (NUL) user-visible changes, a lot has changed under the hood. We have integrated a central admission server that is going to implement global policies for CPU time distribution in a future release. Another notable development is rudimentary libvirt support, which will eventually replace the old configuration syntax. The Demo CD [3] now comes with several virtual machines ready to try.

February 2011: New prerelease versions of the NOVA microhypervisor [1] and its user-level environment NUL [2] are now available for download under the terms of the GNU GPLv2. NOVA is a modern microhypervisor that uses hardware virtualization features to run virtual machines with near-native performance. It also hosts the NOVA Userland (NUL), a multiserver environment featuring a deprivileged virtual machine monitor. The new release brings virtual-machine support to QEMU and older AMD CPUs, both of which lack nested paging. The Demo CD [3] now comes with several virtual machines ready to try, including a GRML Live CD.

February 2011: The TUD:OS group is now part of the Many-core Applications Research Community [1], founded by Intel to foster research of future emerging highly parallel computing platforms. We gain access to the Single-Chip Cloud Computer (SCC) experimental processor [2], which is a 48-core 'concept vehicle' created by Intel Labs as a platform for many-core software research.

Through this program we will investigate new ideas in the areas of virtualization, fault tolerance, and power-aware computing. This complements our ongoing research projects PASSIVE [3] and ASTEROID [4]. Students interested in working with the SCC are welcome to contact Björn Döbel [5].

August 2010: Our group published new prereleases of the NOVA microhypervisor and the user-level environment for NOVA (NUL). New features are the support for I/O virtualization and direct assignment of host devices to guest VMs. The root partition manager and the virtual-machine monitor (VMM) of NUL support several new features, e.g. VESA 2.0, SMP, new network card drivers, MSI/MSI-X, one-shot timer and much more ... More details can be found in the release notes. read more ...

July 2010: Successful participation at the "6th International Workshop on Operating Systems Platforms for Embedded Real-Time Applications" (OSPERT 2010). Our group published one paper - "Timeslice Donation in Component-Based Systems". read more ...

June 2010: Our group released a major revamp of our kernel Fiasco/L4 and the corresponding user-level infrastructure. The most fundamental change to Fiasco/L4 was the replacement of the good old L4 interface with a new one completely based on capabilities. To point out this major change we took the chance to rename the kernel to reflect the changes - Fiasco.OC. Another important step is the support of multi-processor systems and the support of hardware assisted virtualization with Fiasco.OC. The completely redesigned user-land environment running on top of Fiasco.OC is called L4 Runtime Environment (L4Re) and provides the framework to build multi-component systems, including client/server communication framework, common service functionality and popular libraries such as a C library, libstdc++ and pthreads. L4Linux, the multi-architecture virtualized Linux, has been brought up to date with L4Re. The release subsumes our work over the last two years. We consider L4Re and Fiasco.OC to be the successors of L4Env and Fiasco/L4.

More information about L4Re, Fiasco.OC and L4Linux can be found by selecting the according sub-menu on our research overview website.

We wish you a happy hacking and a hot summer. Stay tuned, your TUD:OS group. read more ...

June 2010: Successful participation at "The Ninth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security" (WEIS 2010).
Our group published one paper - "The Mathematics of Obscurity: On the Trustworthiness of Open Source". read more ...

April 2010: Successful participation at EuroSys 2010 conference and at co-located workshops.
Our group published one conference paper, two workshop papers and presented two posters.

The conference paper is about our Microhypervisor NOVA, "NOVA: A Microhypervisor-Based Secure Virtualization Architecture". The workshop papers are about reliability in the context of Fiasco.OC and L4Re, "Stay strong, stay safe - enhancing reliability of a secure operating system", and about a scalable user-level environment in the context of NOVA and the VMM Vancouver, "Towards a Scalable Multiprocessor User-level Environment".
read more ...

April 2010: Restructuring of our download section. Various demos of our group are spread all
over our website. In our download section we added pointers to available demos
and videos. See our micro-kernel Fiasco and our multiserver user stack running
on a ARM11 MPCore developer board and see it running on the OpenMoko mobile
phone Neo 1973. read more ...

March 2010: Successful participation at the international conference on Virtual Execution Environments
(VEE 2010). Our group published one conference paper about Valgrind on Fiasco.OC and L4Re,
"Capability Wrangling made easy: Debugging on a Microkernel with Valgrind". read more ...